Helmet Add-ons Unlikely to Prevent Concussions

Little effect on angular accelerations seen in drop tests.

by John Gever John Gever Managing Editor, MedPage Today
February 25, 2015

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Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

WASHINGTON -- Adding liners, external pads, or friction-reducing treatments to football helmets probably does little to reduce concussion risks for their wearers, according to a study to be presented here.

Lab tests with four such products found that three of them reduced linear accelerations in impacts by about 11%, but the effect on angular accelerations was much smaller with an approximate 2% reduction, according to John Lloyd, PhD, of BRAINS in San Antonio, Fla., and Francis Conidi, MD, DO, of the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology in Port St. Lucie, Fla.

"These findings are important because angular accelerations are believed to be the major biomechanical forces involved in concussion," said Lloyd in a statement issued by the American Academy of Neurology. The research will be presented at the AAN's annual meeting in April.

"Few add-on products have undergone even basic biomechanical evaluation. Hopefully, our research will lead to more rigorous testing of helmets and add-ons," Lloyd added.

In the study, the researchers outfitted standard football helmets with four products billed as helping to reduce concussions:

Helmet Glide, a treatment applied to the helmet shell to reduce friction

With each product in place, helmets were dropped five times from heights of 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 meters. Peak measures of linear and angular acceleration and angular velocity were averaged over the five impacts for each product at each height.

The study abstract, released by the AAN Wednesday, did not report results for Helmet Glide (which its developer advertises as potentially reducing risk from helmet-to-helmet impacts, not directly modeled in the study) and included only summary results for the other three products.

"Our research shows that these technologies have limited effectiveness in reducing the angular forces associated with concussion risk," Lloyd and Conidi wrote in the abstract. "At this time no magic concussion prevention solution exists."

Limitations to the study included its standardized impacts in a lab setting, which do not fully model real-world collisions, nor did it attempt to measure concussion frequencies in actual human players.

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